Here's the life and times of: Tim Hoke; Susan Hoke; Henry Hoke and Meredith Hoke.
There's also a number of other posts too.

Monday, February 4, 2008

Digital Photo Workflow?

Just wanted to take a moment and layout my quandary regarding my digital photo workflow.

I use two cameras to make photos. One is a Canon Digital Rebel (D300) and the other is a Canon SD200. In the past, I've just been shooting in Highest Quality JPEG on both cameras. Due to a recent HDD failure and complete disorganization of my older photos after a partial recovery, I thought I'd try RAW mode on my Rebel. This makes my workflow much more complicated.

In the past, I just used iPhoto and let it manage the library of some 10,000 images. It was bulging at the seems and needed a rework anyway, so the loss of photos seemed like a perfect opportunity to implement a new workflow and reliable backups.

Before coming up with a workflow, I need to figure out what I want to accomplish.

On the input side, there's really two key points:

Shoot RAW in the Rebel to retain highest quality images possible.

Shoot Highest quality JPEG on SD200 since that's all it can do.

On the output side, I *think* this is what I want to handle:

Be able to easily print the images from either camera

Through a local provider (National Camera)

Via web storage (SmugMug)

On my local color inkjet

Store photos on our family gallery at SmugMug (They only accept limited file types and it doesn't include Canon Raw (CRW)).

Easily browse my "library" of photos.

Not end up with 87 copies of each image which occupies disk space.

So now, how to get from input to output?

I've been playing around with some testing and haven't come up with a definitively good solution (aka, perfect workflow). My latest attempt was this:

Shoot RAW with Rebel.

Use Image Capture to "import"/"download"/"copy" images from CF card onto my local HDD in a directory which includes the date and a "subject". eg. 20080204-Raw_Workflow_Test

Once the images are in that dir, I launch Adobe Photoshop CS (8.0) and use the "file browser" function to do some "stuff"

Create two sub-dirs. One called originals and one called rejects. Copy all originals to that dir and then weed out the rejects and move them to that dir.

Batch rename images according to the shot. eg. Subject_Name_000.CRW. Note that this may include an index (which is why batch rename works well).

Use "Dr. Brown's" javascript to convert the CRW files to a new third subdirectory called jpeg. This is quite a sweet deal. Read all about the script and you'll be really impressed.

At this point, I can then upload the images to our SmugMug page and create a backup on CD/DVD, but at a minimum, I run a backup to an external HDD (Which is regularly rotated with another that is offsite).

So this process seems to be almost what I want. I'm missing an easy way to browse my "library" and if I have multiple sessions on the same CF card, it's difficult to complete step 1 (import to specific folder).

To overcome the first obstacle, I could use iPhoto, but then I've got another copy of my images. I also tried using Graphic Converter to both import and then "catalog" my images, but that seems to be a slow program. Maybe I need to give G.C. a bit more testing, but I'm not convinced it'll be part of my eventual workflow. So, I'm starting to look at other programs. I know Apple makes Apperture and then there's Lightroom from Adobe, but both of those are pretty expensive programs.

Some other things to consider...

Adding copyright info to the image and/or EXIF type data.

Resizing images for web pages/e-mail.

Including keywords/other metadata in the EXIF tags.

So far, this workflow ignores the SD200, although some items will apply... Just not the Raw-to-JPEG conversion.

The first two items could be implemented via another javascript (from PhilG) which as far as I can tell is an adaptation of Dr. Brown's.

So, I continue to mull this over, but need to come up with a solution in the next week or so since I'm going to be taking a large number of images thereafter.